'The Last Of Us' First Look Image: Pedro Pascal & Bella Ramsey Star In The Highly Anticipated HBO Series

Films and TV series inspired by video game franchises have a bit of a checkered history, to put it mildly. Mostly, this comes from the issue of adapting a video game, which puts the viewer into an active role in the storytelling, into a project that asks the viewer to sit back and watch it unfold. But this issue could be mitigated in the upcoming HBO series, “The Last of Us,” which is based on a video game that has more cinematic influences than most.

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And in honor of “The Last of Us” being deep into production, HBO has gone ahead and released a first-look image from the series showing the lead actors, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Well, showing the back of their heads, at least. In the series, Pedro Pascal plays a man that has to escort a young woman (Ramsey) through the post-apocalypse, where zombie-like fungus monsters are at every turn. It’s like “The Walking Dead” meets “The Road.”

The excitement about “The Last of Us” and how it seems like the perfect video game franchise to adapt into a TV series comes from just how cinematic it is. While the actual game part of it is fun and tense, there are long stretches of cutscenes featuring stellar voice work and motion capture that make the experience of “The Last of Us” feel like watching a really long movie play out in front of you.

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But then again, this is where the trickiness might come in, as it would be really easy to just adapt “The Last of Us” word-for-word and turn it into a TV series that people who have played the game have already experienced. We’ll have to see just how far the series ventures from the video game path when the show comes out in 2022.

You can see the new image below: